The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for April 3rd, 2008

If you’ve read anything this morning, you know that Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) is pushing for an effective perpetual appointment of Supreme Court justices, with automatically-renewing 10-year terms unless a supermajority of 21 state Senators vote to revoke the appointment. Now, Dan Bice, late of the Spice Boys but still with the Journal Sentinel, is reporting Red Fred is going to be facing disciplinary charges from the Office of Lawyer Regulation regarding his conduct during his wife’s hotly-contested judicial race in 2004. Bice doesn’t mention it, but if my memory serves, the final arbiter of those disciplinary charges is the same Wisconsin State Supreme Court that the voters just unpacked.

Revisions/extensions (6:20 pm 4/3/2008) – I get (uncredited) results; either Bice or Greg J. Borowski, who posted it on the All Politics blog for Bice, put in a mention that the complaint could well make it to the state Supreme Court.

Since I heard there was a shiny new back-end for WordPress in the new 2.5 version, I decided I would test it out before putting it up.

The good:
– It loads a bit faster than 2.3.3.
– The modified Journalized 2 beta 2 theme (yes, it does need to be modified some to work with 2.3, and I added widgetizing while I was at it) works as well in 2.5 as it does in 2.3.3. Before you ask, no, I won’t be releasing that; it still is Mike Little’s project, and he does have my mods someplace.
– MOST of the plugins I use work without any updates.
– Plugin updates no longer require FTP access; assuming a standard Apache install, you can now install updates directly from the plugin admin page. It should be the same thing for updating WordPress itself.

The bad:
– Those of you using Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam will need to upgrade to 3.0.2.
– The release version of WP-Polls (2.21) is broken. There is a beta version out there that does work with 2.5.
– The new media management feature does not work in IE.

The ugly:
– I hate the new post page; I miss having the options to the right of the post box.

I thought Barack was going to improve the reputation of the US throughout the world?

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) – Colombia’s president sharply criticized U.S. presidential contender Barack Obama on Wednesday for opposing a trade deal with his country, calling the Democrat out of touch with the realities of the South American nation.

It’s good to know that it’s not just North American countries Obama is out of touch with!

I doubt I’ll be doing much blogging today because it already is a bad day. Good thing it’s Open Thread Thursday…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ny5ajCn0xw[/youtube]

– Dagney Taggert is having second thoughts about propping up Hillary. I’m not; the popcorn concessions are through the roof.
– Plebian looks into the intelligence level of the average Moronblog.
– Fausta asks, “What would ‘Rats do without rats?”
– Jim Hoft discovers some Absolut Bravo Sierra. And who said Swedes are neutral?
– Just A Grunt notes Boeing is good enough for Iraq. But, but, but I thought Iraq was dysfunctional and Boeing was corrupt.
– Charlie Sykes, DeanMundy, PaulSocha, and BrianFraley (yes, that’s 4 posts from Brian) all note the temper tantrums from the Left because they couldn’t rig the elections this past Tuesday. It wasn’t for a lack of trying on the Left’s part.

“Mark to market” is a term that few if any, outside of the financial or accounting industries had heard prior to mid last year. Now, most people have heard the term and know that it is somehow related to the problem of the subprime market.

In short, “mark to market” means that financial institutions need to recognize the market value of their investments as they change rather than waiting until they dispose of the asset and recognizing a gain or loss. The purpose for “mark to market” is to reflect the estimated “value” change of the asset real time rather than having shareholders or mutual fund holders get surprised (up or down) in one fell swoop.

Numerous articles have been written suggesting that mark to market while not causing, greatly exaggerated the subprime issues. The argument, one that I support, is that when the ability to sell what used to be “marketable securities” i.e. the bundled subprime mortgages, dried up and the only way to sell one of these was through a forced or coerced sale, the value of these bonds was set artificially and unrealistically low. The result was that financial institutions holding these bonds were required to write their values down to a “market value” which was substantially less than what the reasonably expected value of the loans were. (more…)